New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 20-23, 2012.

The 53rd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2012),
sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on
Mathematical Foundations of Computing, will be held
in New Brunswick, New Jersey on October 21-23 (Sunday through Tuesday).
Several workshops and invited tutorial presentations will be given on Saturday, October
20th.

Papers
presenting new and original research on theory of computation are
sought.
Typical but not exclusive topics of interest include: algorithms and
data structures, computational complexity, cryptography, computational
learning theory, computational game theory, parallel and distributed
algorithms, quantum computing, computational geometry, computational
applications of logic, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics,
optimization, randomness in computing, approximation algorithms,
algorithmic coding theory, algebraic computation, and theoretical
aspects of areas such as networks, privacy, information retrieval,
computational biology, and databases. Papers that broaden the reach of
the theory of computing, or raise important problems that can benefit
from theoretical investigation and analysis, are encouraged.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: 5pm PDT, April 4, 2012.

Notification: by June 24th, 2012.

Final version of accepted papers due: August 15, 2012.

Submission format:

Submissions should start with a title page consisting of the title of
the paper; each author's name, affiliation, and email address; and an
abstract of 1-2 paragraphs summarizing the paper's contributions.
A submission must contain within its first ten pages a clear
presentation of the merits of the paper, including discussion of its
importance, prior work, and an outline (similar to a brief oral
presentation) of key technical ideas and methods used to achieve the
main claims.
There is no bound on the length of a submission, but material other
than the abstract, references, and the first ten pages may be
considered as supplementary and will be read at the committee's
discretion. Authors are encouraged to put the references at the very
end of the submission.
The submission should include all of the ideas necessary for an
expert to verify fully the central claims in the paper.
Finally, the submission should be addressed to a broad spectrum of
theoretical computer scientists, not solely to experts in the subarea.

The extended abstract should be typeset using 11-point or larger fonts,
in a single-column, single-space (between lines) format with ample
spacing throughout and 1-inch margins all around. Submissions deviating
significantly from these guidelines risk rejection without consideration
of their merits.

All submissions will be treated as confidential, and will only
be disclosed to the committee and their chosen sub-referees.

Submission instructions:

Authors are required to submit their extended abstracts electronically,
in PDF (without security restrictions on copying or printing).
Detailed instructions will be available via a link from the call for papers Web
page in March.
Submissions will be judged solely on the basis of the extended abstract
submitted by the deadline; postdeadline revisions will not be allowed.

On-line posting:

Authors are encouraged to post full versions of their submissions in a
freely accessible on-line repository such as the arxiv, the ECCC, or the Cryptology ePrint archive.
(Papers that are not written well enough
for public dissemination are probably also not ready for submission to
FOCS.) We expect that authors of accepted papers will make full
versions of their papers, with proofs, available by the camera-ready
deadline. (This should be done in a manner consistent with the ACM
Copyright Policy.)

Prior and simultaneous submission:

The conference will follow SIGACT's policy on prior publication and
simultaneous submissions.
Work that has been previously published in another
conference proceedings or journal, or which is scheduled for publication
prior to December 2012, will not be considered for acceptance at FOCS
2012. Simultaneous submission of the same (or essentially the same)
abstract to FOCS 2012 and to another conference with published
proceedings or journal is not allowed.
The program committee may interact with program chairs of other (past
or future) conferences to find out about closely related submissions.

Awards:

The Machtey award will be given to the best paper or papers written
solely by one or more students. An abstract is eligible if all authors
are full-time students at the time of submission. This should be
indicated at the time of submission. All submissions are eligible for
the Best Paper award. The committee may decide to split the awards
between multiple papers, or to decline to make an award.

Presentation of Accepted Papers:

One author of each accepted paper will be expected to present the work at the conference.